Ongoing Google Ads management should cover campaign build/structure, bid and budget management, weekly search term mining, ad testing, landing page feedback, and regular reporting. It shouldn't include your website build, organic SEO, or social media — those are separate skill sets, often separate invoices.
Start a conversationIt’s one of the vaguest phrases in marketing. Ask five agencies what’s included in their monthly management fee and you’ll get five different answers — some genuinely comprehensive, some a thin wrapper around a ‘set it and forget it’ campaign that gets touched once a month.
That vagueness works in the seller’s favour, not the buyer’s. If you don’t know what should be happening to your account week to week, you can’t tell whether you’re getting a real service or paying someone to glance at a dashboard once in a while and call it ‘management’. Google Ads is also unusual in that a badly managed account doesn’t fail loudly — it just quietly burns budget on the wrong searches, at the wrong bids, with tired ads, while the invoices keep arriving on schedule.
This is a plain breakdown of what proper ongoing management actually involves, and what it usually doesn’t — so you can sanity-check a quote you’ve been given, or an agency or freelancer relationship you’re already in and paying for.
It’s worth saying: scope confusion isn’t only a problem when a buyer is underserved. It also happens in reverse, where a client assumes a Google Ads retainer quietly covers their website, their SEO, and general ‘digital marketing’ — and then feels let down when a PPC specialist says a particular fix sits outside what they were engaged to do.
The fix in both directions is the same. Get the scope written down in plain language before the retainer starts, not implied by the word ‘management’ doing a lot of unstated work.
If a quote or an existing invoice doesn’t map onto something close to that first list, ask directly what you’re paying for. A management fee that only covers ‘monitoring’ with no evidence of search term mining, bid adjustments or ad testing over a few months is a fee for very little activity — and it’s a completely fair question to put to whoever’s running your account, however long you’ve worked with them.
This cuts both ways for the buyer, too. Sometimes the honest answer is that your account genuinely doesn’t need heavy weekly intervention — a stable, well-optimised account in a low-volatility niche can be managed well with lighter-touch monitoring than a fast-moving ecommerce account in a competitive category. The point isn’t that every account needs maximum activity; it’s that you should know which situation yours is in, and be able to see the evidence either way.
My Google Ads management starts from £300 a month, covering up to £3,000 a month in ad spend; above that it’s charged at 10% of spend (so £4,500 a month in spend works out at £450 a month in fees). Ad spend itself is paid directly to Google — the fee is the management charge only, with no markup on media.
That fee covers the full list above: structure, bids and budgets, search term mining, ad testing, landing page feedback, reporting and account monitoring. It doesn’t cover building your website or running your SEO or social media — but I’ll happily point out when one of those is the actual thing holding your Google Ads back, even though fixing it sits outside the retainer.
I work UK-wide and remotely, direct with the person actually running the account rather than through an account manager relaying instructions to someone else — so when you ask what happened to your budget this week, you’re asking the person who made the decision.
Not normally. A good PPC manager will tell you when a landing page is costing you conversions and give specific feedback on what to change, but actually building or redesigning the page is web design work and is usually scoped and priced separately.
Not unless it’s explicitly agreed and priced as a separate service. Paid search and organic SEO are different disciplines with different skill sets — a Google Ads retainer doesn’t automatically include SEO work.
It should be a defined cadence you’ve actually agreed to upfront, not something that only turns up when you ask. Monthly is common for most accounts, though the right frequency depends on your spend level and how quickly the account moves.
At minimum: search terms being reviewed with negative keywords added where needed, bids or budgets being adjusted based on performance, and someone actually looking at the account rather than letting automated bidding run untouched for weeks at a time.
Getting tracking working correctly at the start of an engagement typically is, and monitoring that it keeps working (tags breaking, tracking gaps appearing) should be part of ongoing account monitoring. A full analytics or CRM integration project beyond that is often scoped separately.
Because ‘Google Ads management’ isn’t a standardised term — some fees buy genuinely active weekly management, others buy minimal oversight of an account left mostly on autopilot. Comparing quotes on price alone without checking what’s actually included in each is how buyers end up disappointed.
If you've got a quote you want sanity-checked, or you suspect your account isn't getting the weekly attention you're paying for, book a free strategy call and I'll give you an honest read on what should be happening in your account.
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